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People of Pioneer Square

My name is Christine Haskell and I started People of Pioneer Square (#PeopleofPSQ) to put a face on my neighborhood. Pioneer Square is Seattle's most popular vice district and the heart of the city (historically and architecturally). I believe that vice districts are created due to benign deglect. I want to understand and make my neighborhood more personal for people. I want to know who lives here, what causes the fear we have of one another, and how that develops the space we live in (from both a personal and economic perspective).

What does it take to understand your neighborhood and how to better advocate for it? I'm a doctoral student focusing on how ethical orientation is a predictor of financial success in Fortune 500 companies. If we know this, then why aren't all companies more proactive in their thinking? I think this relates to our relationships with our communities. We know that civic engagement and community directly contribute to our mental and physical health; why isn't there more of it? How are companies, organizations and individuals acting and investing in their own neighborhood?

People of Pioneer Square™ is a platform for sharing, connecting and discussing trends in social good in our own backyard in an increasingly digital age.

I’m going to try to write one major piece each month on Pioneer Square on a major theme. As I was considering the neighborhood the last few days the theme of Connection came up.

Winston Churchill argued that we shape our buildings which then they shape us. The same is true of our digital technologies. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram played a major role in the ability to connect and share local events as they unfolded. But what of our neighborhoods? How does Pioneer Square shape those who live in it?

We pay for the ease and frequency of our communication with the depth of our relationships. The irony, of course, is that our increasingly vanishing connection to each other is driven by our deep need to connect. It is no accident that we are all collectively spending over 230 thousand years worth of time on social media in a single month.

Technology has become the architect of our intimacies. Over the past 15 years, Sherry Turkle (author of Alone Together) studied technologies of mobile communication. She found that our little devices, those little devices in our pockets, are so psychologically powerful that they don’t only change what we do, they change who we are. Some of the things we do now with our devices are things that, only a few years ago, we would have found odd or disturbing, but they’ve quickly come to seem familiar, just how we do things. For example, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death was communicated via a tweet, before his three young children, with whom he was scheduled to spend the day, and his longtime partner, Mimi O’Donnell were notified.

There’s a great summary in Salon about how ethics is changing for journalists:

In its ethics code, the Society of Professional Journalists has an entire section on “minimizing harm,” guided by the principle that “ethical journalists treat sources, subjects and colleagues as human beings deserving of respect.” The section cautions reporters to show compassion and be sensitive when investigating a tragedy. It urges them to “show good taste” and “avoid pandering to lurid curiosity.” Increasingly, “minimizing harm” is becoming a quaint concern, a nostalgic vestige of a bygone era in journalism. Now, breaking news is breaking us. We’re cycling through tragedies at lightning speed and without affording ourselves the adequate time to reflect and to grieve. The pursuit of journalistic expediency is eroding our empathy, and readers are left the worse for it.

All this makes me wonder about the burst of emotion Seattle felt in the streets last night.

Community support for the team has been building for months. It makes sense that a win would be like popping a cork. The unleashing of emotion started out friendly, with just a few people in the streets. We went out and joined the crowd for a bit. One side of our street was dedicated to pedistrians, the other had cars attempting to go home, all beeping horns in support of Seattle. Within an hour both sides of the street were literally flooded. People were climbing the historic pergola, hanging from lamposts, and carrying street signs away–all under the watch of the Seattle Police Department. They didn’t even remove people from the street lights. After some time, the police taped off the pergola and stood underneath it which (eventually) proved effective.

When I think of the hassles of the neighborhood and why I’m not more involved, I think of the time it takes away from other things I want or need to get done. “Conversating” takes place in real time and you can’t control what you’re going to say. Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body — not too little, not too much, just right.

What is interesting to me is the potential for connection given all these social tools. All these apps make it very easy to just hop from introduction to introdction at the expense of building depth of connection. Human relationships are rich and they’re messy and they’re demanding.

What does that mean when we consider our own back yard? While I can’t wrap my head around folks whom are scared to cross the bridge, how do help educate people who are afraid of vice districts? How do we reach out more to the homeless? What impact does local shopping have on globalization? How can we connect and partner more effectively with our government (with the same ease we have in navigating Nordstrom’s customer service department)?

We can only clean up so much with technology. And when we do, one of the things that can happen is that we sacrifice conversation for mere connection. We short-change ourselves. And over time, we seem to forget this, or we seem to stop caring.

Comments and Discussions

So happy to hear you are taking a leadership role in your local community. I so agree that even in our well connected world, people are hungry for connection that involves getting together for fun, meaningful conversation and purposeful work.